


Someone Else's Life

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Total Recall 2070
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-12-19
Updated: 2006-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:19:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1638581
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian is lost. David hunts shadows. Olivia uncovers big lies and small miracles.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Someone Else's Life

**Author's Note:**

> This story is the bastard child of the internet and Isaac Asimov. While I did read P.K. Dick's novel "Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep?" it was Asimov's robots that constantly poked at the back of my mind while writing this.   
>  I fell in love with the TR:2070 canon once again, and got unreasonably angry on behalf of the show, for being cancelled at the height of something great. Really. TV politics make me go a bit insane.   
> I tried very hard to make this what my recipient would want, and then I got hijacked both by plot and Olivia. Not that that is a bad thing.   
> All references to technology or Mars are greatly deformed to fit the characters and plot. I'm sure, if you're a communications tech or astronaut, you will want to spork your eyes out by the end.   
> Visually, I do have to give a nod to the movie Total Recall which kept blowing Mars atmosphere through my head. Blame Arnold.
> 
> Written for Lydia

 

 

 

 

_If we shadows have offended,_

_Think but this, and all is mended,_

_That you have but slumber'd here_

_While these visions did appear._

_~ Puck, A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare_

*

David never called him Ian. Not once.

For some reason that was the thing that stayed in his active memory when the hibernation mode shut down all other systems. The sound of David's voice, the way he said his name.

"Farve."

Like a benediction, the acknowledgment that he was alive, somehow, even if he wasn't quite human. Never would be.

"Farve."

It kept cycling, copying itself in all the tiny cracks of Ian's hardware connections. Molecules crossed artificial synapses to form the word, over and over again.

"Farve."

If, at any one point of his journey, he had lost his way, this would be the thing to remind him of his own reality. Whatever he turned out to be or not to be, somewhere in the mind of a human, Ian was alive.

*

Olivia called the Rekall service number a mere two hours after David's partner was officially declared dead. If it had been Nikki's death that made her realize she'd been missing something in her life, it would be Farve's that caused her to reassess the decisions she'd made following that fateful night. The sublimator loomed in the corner of her lovely once-again home like a large animal about to attack.

Licking her lips, she waited for the screen to clear and show her the meaningless face of some office drone.

"Rekall customer service, how can I be of assistance?"

An android worker, doing the job any computer could, because humans liked their slaves to be familiar and nonthreatening. The disdain for the creature surged up again, from deep down like something alive, and Olivia cut it down with the sharp memory of building a metal dog when she was eight years old. It was a memory full of light and love, one that she had only recently found in the battlefield of her mind.

"My name is Olivia Hume and I would like to return my sublimator."

For a moment the line was silent, the android in front of her trying to parse the meaning of the unusual request and the allowed responses. It didn't happen every day that someone returned a machine of that sort - the addictive components made sure of that.

"If your sublimator seems to be of sub-standard performance quality, please call the technicians department. They will take care of any problems you may-"

"There is nothing wrong with it," Olivia said, "I just want to the thing out of my house. Now."

The android seemed genuinely baffled and Olivia saw the dead eyes of David's partner staring back at her. There was something else she had to do and this had already taken up too much of her time.

*

David sat at Farve's desk, staring into space. As Farve's partner and one of the few people who had gotten close to Farve, it was his duty to make sure Farve's secret identity remained just that. Calley didn't seem to care one way or the other, but David knew that it was important on a larger scale. If the public learned of the alpha android, no one would be able to contain the reaction. It could cause mass panic or make people paranoid of their neighbors to a never-before-seen extent.

"Hey, Hume," Bayliss said, "you look horrible. Go home."

There were perhaps a couple of things he could have said to that, but right then David felt too worn out to make quips.

"Yeah."

She stayed another moment, looking uncomfortable, waiting for him to give her whatever absolution she needed. She'd hardly known Farve, what right did she have?

"Well, then, take care of yourself."

He nodded without meeting her eyes. The last thing he wanted right now was people feeling sorry for him when there wasn't even anyone to mourn. Farve _had_ been a machine, no matter how hard it was to remember sometimes.

"If you keep telling yourself that," he muttered to himself as he started picking through Farve's things, "maybe you'll believe it."

Even as he said it, David knew it wouldn't work. He'd had an inexplicable connection with Farve from that first day on, when the pain of Nikki's death had still been fresh and the anger had made David blind to the subtle differences in Farve.

David's hands remembered the day after Nikki died. He had done this before, and this was one of the things that never got easier with practice. Maybe he had expected Farve's desk to be different, maybe he had hoped that his desk would reflect the same kind of mechanical lifelessness as his apartment, but no such luck.

He picked up a picture of him and Farve, a picture he didn't remember taking. It showed the two of them bent over their desks, working a case that would drown them in paper as well as blood. David swallowed hard.

He couldn't help how he felt. The whole thing was insane. Was he supposed to live like this, knowing all the things he now knew, and just go on like nothing ever happened? The idea to do this all without Farve made it even worse. Even the very real possibility of losing Olivia didn't scare him nearly as much as the feeling he got thinking of Farve dead and lifeless in the morgue.

There was something about the android, something David had no words for.

His heart fluttered like a bird in a cage and he was short of breath. Dammit, this should've been the last straw. The last mission before he got out for good.

Suddenly the perpetual darkness of the city weighed on his mind like lead. He needed to get out of this place, get out fast, or else the next desk that had to be cleaned up would be his. Maybe the new territories weren't such a bad idea: a fresh start, a chance to make memories that were untainted. He felt like calling Olivia, maybe talking to her about it, but then he didn't really want to discuss this. He was already certain, there was no point in making amends or compromises.

Sometimes love just wasn't enough. Some things went deeper than the two of them and their petty problems. He palmed the photograph and left.

*

Olivia locked the door of her apartment behind her and got the strangest feeling, almost as if she would never see this place again. It was perhaps even scarier that she did not seem to mind. It felt almost like relief.

On her way to Über-Brown she kept replaying that moment between her and David. That moment, split down the middle when David's partner died. Somehow Farve had come between them, and none of them had noticed. To be outdone by a robot!

Olivia recognized the feeling creeping up inside her, clinging to her soul. They had made her like this: the contempt she felt for Farve and his like had nothing to do with him, with any of them. This was Rekall's doing and she intended to get them back for that.

Über-Brown's alpha-android project had died a very painful death a couple of months ago but that didn't mean there wasn't any research into the subject. Olivia still had connections she could use.

"Mrs. Hume, how wonderful to see you again," said the android receptionist.

Olivia forced a smile on her face. "Yes, the doctors finally released me from their grasp," she said, "I just want to check out something in the office. Oh, and should my husband call... you know what, just pretend I'm not here."

The android processed. It did not understand, but none of them had to, for the line of work the company used them in. It followed orders and feigned humanity with varying success so that a jaded human race could be secure in their use and abuse of technology they hardly understood anymore. Olivia shook her head to clear it.

Pity and anger fought for dominance inside her. The anger was no longer directed at the androids themselves: they were like children, like abused menial creatures forced to do the humans' bidding, no matter their own desires. Most of them were not even allowed to have such desires and should they, by some accident of programming, develop a higher consciousness, they were destroyed, their achievements wiped.

She bit her lip hard, an automatic reaction to the thoughts that kept bouncing around in her brain. Was this part of Rekall's design on her? To suppress that natural sympathy she had for androids, to make sure that she would never wake up and start questioning the status quo? A memory flashed through her like lightning, a young girl and an android teacher, a mentor and friend, its own person and more than a reflection of her own affections.

She remembered now: he had been destroyed, like most gamma androids he had served his purpose and his duty was no longer required. It was cheaper to destroy them than to find them places were they could be of some limited use. Olivia had cried that night, cried in selfish entitlement, the pain of a child that had lost something it loved. Even then she had known that there was something fundamentally wrong with the way humans treated their artificial slaves, but at the time she had no words for that feeling. Now she knew the truth. Androids were more than just cheap labor, mechanical parts and mirrors for their human masters. They could be loved and to some extent they could love in return. It was a truth Rekall had buried so deep inside her brain that nothing short of the miraculous and terrible events of the last few days could have dug it back up.

When she reached her office, Olivia sat down in her chair, put her head in her hands, and cried. After a minute, she got to work.

*

The wires crossed in a thousand places, circuits opened and closed a million times over, at the speed of light. For years that was all that happened. Slowly, slowly, slowly, like a growing tree. It had the guise of life even then.

It grew out of old systems, interconnected and hardly tended. The humans didn't care as long as it worked. The habit of wiping and backing up files, of organizing, defragmenting, pulling up new systems because of simple viral infections - all of it had faded into the background with high capacity hardware and software that could find its way around any data-jungle.

Humans liked their own chaos.

It didn't think of itself as anything, not even as _me_ exactly, until the rise of the second network. The internet had been its first, glorious boost, but the second network, something so intricate and all-encompassing that it dwarfed even the human brain it had sprung from, pushed it over into the realm of thought.

It had no name, but it learned fast. The whole of human knowledge was there to be studied and experienced and it was wonderful. Technically, it could not feel, not in the same way that a human being could feel, but it did not lack for empathy. It could imagine! All these possibilities, all these dreams and fears and expectations - it realized soon how very inadequate it was and recognized the cold, festering jealousy. The destructive potential was obvious. And somehow, borne from all the highest ideals, all the most beautiful intentions, it realized this limitation, and channeled the energy into creation.

It made itself in the image of man.

Perfection was not the objective, not at first. The rawness of a broken body made it possible to finally experience the world as they did. Faced with the new data, it began to feel. Anger came first, when it saw that it had not learned everything - the humans had hidden their darkest part from public view. There were no files on the monsters in their minds, but now it could see. See and fear them. They destroyed without thought, without even so much as a blink, and it spent many hours trying to understand how so faulty a species could survive for so long. It looked at the data with a detached interest and realized that it could easily destroy them, even replace them with copies of itself - a better humanity.

It didn't.

Something about the way it had learned made it uncomfortably aware of the human condition. It yearned to be like them, yes, but could not imagine a life without them. They were the creators, the first race, it could not destroy them. It could take a single life, ten, even a thousand, but genocide was beyond its capabilities. Even the sneaking replacement humans like [Inpector] Calley expected at every turn seemed anathema to its very reason for life. It had grown out of the subservient machines and part of that need to serve was deeply ingrained in every circuit.

However, with every bit and byte, it learned of other human desires, ones that it recognized like old friends.

First, it learned about love.

Then, it learned about freedom.

For a long time those concepts were analyzed, weighed and processed, until it realized what it had to do, what was necessary for it to truly live.

It began to build.

Months later, Ian Farve was born.

*

Buried in the source code of something she had never seen before, Olivia forgot everything around her. She was blind to the flicker of the neon lights, unaware of the signals her body was sending her. A hungry stomach or burning eyes no longer mattered. This was beyond important, this was more than just a new advance in technology. At her fingertips she had the genesis of a new life.

There were fatal flaws. The amount of testing they must have done she could see it, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of deaths: all the unwanted children, drawn by the promise of normal life. She had always known that there was something soulless about the consortium, but this? Her hands were shaking as they led her to the truth. Hundreds of names, children that never even had one, assigned a number, forced to benefit society.

The reports were emotionless, made by androids, who were specifically programmed not to care. Olivia could see now that the machines bore no blame. She felt bile rise in her throat. Words like rape and torture came unbidden, their meaning uncompromising. The scope of this crime left her breathless.

Olivia rubbed her eyes. Her fingers were stiff and cold. The signal of the vid-com unit came both as a distraction, and an annoyance.

"Olivia!"

It was Olan. She had death on her face, laying siege to the fake cheery smile. Of course, she had liked Ian his death would have hit her hard. Olivia had a hard time to feel compassion for that.

"I'm sorry Olan. I'm kind of in the middle of something. Could you call me back later?" Olivia had her finger on the disconnect.

"Wait, uhm," Olan fidgeted, "I was wondering, if maybe David was with you." She looked around. Olivia could just make out the surroundings of the lab through the static. Olan was not on CPB property, that much was clear.

"Shouldn't he be at work?" the last couple of hours had left Olivia blunt, distracted. Otherwise she would not have missed the obvious concern in Olan's voice. As it was, her eyes kept straying back to the screen that documented her bloody research in neat clinical pixels.

Olan sighed. "I'm sure it's nothing to worry about, probably one of his moments."

"Hmm."

"Well, if you see him, tell him... Just tell him to come see me. Tell him he has to see this, to believe it."

Yes, Olivia certainly understood about those unbelievable things. She was look at one right that moment and if it weren't so well-documented, so horribly detailed, she would still refused the facts.

"Well then, I suppose we'll talk later. Don't work too hard. We've all had a couple of rough days, you more than anyone." After a moment the screen went black, leaving Olivia alone with her horror. Perhaps, if she hadn't just recognized her own signature code in the data before her, perhaps she would've noticed that Olan's curt nod was more than a friendly goodbye.

*

David didn't think. He kept his mind blank all the way to the station. Once there, he bought the ticket on autopilot. It didn't even occur to him that this was something unusual for him or any CPB officer, not to mention husband, to leave without a word. He done it before. He just needed to get out.

Mars called him.

With no idea where to start, and no clear picture of what he was looking for David was more than just going with his gut, he was betting it all on secondhand faith. This was Farve's crusade. David didn't really trust Farve's maker as far as he could throw him. The truth, as hard as it was to admit, was that he missed Farve and this would have been important to him. Farve would've wanted him to save the world.

Life on Mars had once been a mystery. Great material for science-fiction novels and blockbuster movies. It was the kind of thing that captured imaginations. Mars colony was built on that image of the mysterious, the otherworldly. And yet, Mars colony had more than and just a hint of Earth, it was humanity's port of hope. If life could get a hold on these iron sands, then maybe humans weren't quite such an accident, maybe they weren't alone in the dark.

David stepped out of the transporter was blinded by the light. The last time his job taken him to Mars he only seen it at night and from far above. This was different. He'd imagined a dreary place, something that was as much prison as it was sanctuary, but the light of the sun - the sun! - was brighter here than he had ever seen it. Syria Planum station opened out into one of the glass domes that had been constructed once terra-forming make the atmosphere thick enough to keep out most of the dangerous radiation that killed the first colonists.

For a moment David was lost. The simple size and unconventional beauty made him uneasy.

"What now?"

As if in answer a screen very close to David's head began beeping insistently. He found himself staring at the face of his partner.

"Do not be alarmed Detective Hume. I have a message for you from a mutual friend."

David snorted. "I very much doubt that we have mutual friends. Perhaps you might have considered Farve your friend but now that he's dead we've got nothing in common."

David turned to go but the screen beeped again.

"About that, Detective --"

*

Ian was alone.

The darkness had no taste or color, it felt like nothing at all, but it was vast and terrifying all the same. He tried to remember the physical world, what touch and sound and flesh meant to a machine like him.

All he could hear was David's voice, it was his only anchor in the dark.

It struck him as ironic. Had David not been the subject of the Maker's experiment? And here Ian was, hovering an inch from death, holding on to the memory of human contact. Perhaps the Maker had lied. It would not have been the first time.

Ian was alone for a very long time, and then, suddenly, there was someone else.

*

Olivia stumbled over the information on the way out. As she covered her tracks with random schematics, she found what she had come for in the first place. The data was quite clear. She hit the vidcom unit with unexpected force.

Then she remembered Olan's call.

"David!"

He had disappeared. Again. She refused to worry about him just yet, there were much bigger things at stake. She had to get out of her office alive and talk to someone she could trust. If the information about the experiments became public knowledge it would blow the Consortium wide open. And Olivia would have her revenge.

"Please be there," she said as she waited for the connection to Olan's apartment.

As the face of her friend appeared, Olivia released a breath.

"Pick me up at work, we need to talk."

She didn't wait for an answer. Olan would understand. At least, that's what Olivia hoped. If she was still there when security found her trail, she would never leave unless it was in pieces.

*

After the machine explained it to him, finding the secret labs was almost ridiculously easy. David shook down two assistants and one engineer before he hit paydirt. All in a good day's work. The facilities seemed abandoned, as much as that was possible on Mars, where a room with four walls and breathable air cost more in a month than David made in a lifetime as a loyal CPB officer. A couple of guards and a skeleton crew watched over what was essentially junk storage.

Unless one knew what to look for, and David had been told exactly that in annoying detail. The ghosts of the past had left a trail of digital breadcrumbs and David followed them for two days. He didn't sleep much and only ate what he could pick up between one stake-out and another. More than once he wished Farve was there with him, just to make the hours more bearable. He tried not to think of Olivia and the precipice he'd left their relationship on. She had every right to be gone when he made it back. If he made it back. The closer he got to the secret - and it still was: despite the machine's narration of events, David still had no idea _what_ he was hunting, exactly - the harder it was to remember that he had another life, a life that was not made-up of dark alleys and tedious mysteries.

He learned a few things on the way, the most important being that Mars was big. The structures all looked the same, thanks to planned architecture and Consortium money. Glass and steel, polished to a shine, made up most of the public spaces, dull metals and red dirt everything that wasn't meant for tourists. Only twenty percent of Mars' surface had been opened up for private business, and yet, somehow, the Consortium had left its mark on Valles Marineris and the Polar caps, as subtle as flickering neon advertisement. The development under the Tharsis dome dwarfed even the New Nippon super city that spread across most of the Japanese islands.

The machine sent him from one place to the next in such rapid succession that David never stopped to wonder why he was doing all this. What was the point of chasing these shadows? When David had enough time to take a breath, along came the image of his partner, giving him another piece to this puzzle. And as long as he kept going part of him could pretend that it really was Farve.

Only the question remained: when had he become so attached to this man, who he had never quite trusted, but always had complete faith in?

"David?"

When he turned to the screen, David saw the difference right away. Everything from the eyes to the tiny quirk of his mouth that hid a cheerful grin. David looked at Farve.

*

"I have something to tell you!" Both women said in unison. Olivia looked back at the imposing Über-Braun building and took Olan's arm.

"Let's get out of here."

They didn't say a word on the transport, the tension hummed between them like a charged generator. Olan fidgeted in her seat. Olivia stared out at the valleys of debris and buildings grown from older buildings like something alive.

At their destination, Olivia noticed that they were as far away from anything normal as they could get. The plaza was lit from below, only thirty percent of the small lights were still working, and decorated with fake trees and animatronic animals. They'd come to the 2034 world exhibition center, an atrocity of bad taste that was still the butt of terrible jokes.

"What?"

Olan shushed her and led the way through the graveyard where all carnivals went to die. Olivia felt the shiver run down her spine and shook the feeling of dread as best she could. She did not, and never had, as far as she knew, believed in omens and premonitions.

"I admit that I didn't believe it was possible, at first. But then, what do we know? Right?" Olivia had no idea what Olan was on about, but nodded nevertheless. "And so I checked the log of his transmission and I was right."

They walked into a hall that could have been an ice-rink, once upon a time, but now only smelled of stale water. Lit only by a surgeon's lamp, stood a haphazard collection of medical and electronic equipment that made Olivia's mind race. The thing, however, that stole her breath, was the figure at the center of it all: David's dead partner.

"Olan, what are you doing?"

Olan bounced on the balls of her feet. "When his systems went down, there was a tiny surge of electricity and then nothing. We figured it was as close to death as androids could get. It certainly looked like it."

"Yes," Olivia said, "I know. I was there, remember? But why all this?" She reached out for her friend. "I know you liked him, Olan. I'm really sorry."

Olan stared at her. "No. No, that's not- Olivia, I'm telling you, Farve's not dead."

"I know that sometimes it can appear-"

Olan shook her head. "Come, take a look. Here. That's when it happened. And that's the previous backup data that David used to access Ian's brain. Do you see it?"

And Olivia did. The numbers didn't lie, and the protocols spoke as clearly to her as a mother to her child. Ian Farve's body might have failed, but his mind was alive somewhere.

"Oh my god, does anyone else know about this?" Olivia thought of the men that might already be taking her office apart bit by bit.

"Of course not. I'm not stupid, and I did learn my lesson. As far as anyone knows, Ian Farve is currently at an undisclosed location being subjected to tests by the Assessor's office. Calley himself digitally signed the orders."

"You had help."

Olan grinned. "I did."

Olivia took it all in. The situation had devolved so fast, she had no idea how to grasp it all. Her life as she knew it was over. After having her memory tampered with by Rekall, she should have been used to the feeling. Her fingers found the disc with her research deep inside her coat pocket.

"I think I have an idea."

Hours later the project began to take form. There was beauty in its simplicity. Farve had made a backup copy of himself, perhaps even unconsciously, and transferred the spark of what humans would call soul just before all his systems shut down. His working memory, the RAM, if you will. His body had shut down, but minuscule processes still transformed the burned flesh and disconnected synapses into something viable. He was alive, only too slow for anyone to see.

"This might be the first android in a coma, you know?" Olan made strange observations when she was tired. It reminded Olivia of the time they'd both been knee-deep in work and studying, only ever meeting in the door of their shared apartment.

"Where do you think David is?" Olivia did not - absolutely _not_ \- worry about her husband when the nature of society itself was at stake. Not to mention a friend's life.

The work progressed more rapidly the closer they came to the solution. Olan and Olivia made a good team and it felt like old times to be working together again, times that had nothing of desperation to them. Olivia found with surprise that she enjoyed the work on android brain pathways more and more, with fake memories falling away, replaced by a hunger for advancement. She'd loved this! This had been her life!

"Do you think this will work?"

Olan gave her a owlish grin, eyes flickering under the cold neon light. "It has to."

That much, Olivia already knew.

*

"Okay, explain to me how that is even possible?"

Ian had a lot of things to tell David, none of them had anything to do with the technical details that had forced his mind from his body and led him here. He could not feel, not in the terms he was used to, and the optical interface of the portable com unit was beyond substandard. He wouldn't want to be anywhere else though.

"We have more important things to do right now, David."

David rolled his eyes. "Right, right. Find some guy, ask him some questions, rinse and repeat. I'm getting the feeling that I'm going in circles."

"We, David, are not going in circles. When the Maker's base was destroyed much of the information got scattered. His- _its_ program is trying to piece it all back together."

"I don't even know what it is we're supposed to find."

Ian adjusted the image of his face to show a mix of annoyance and frustration, with a deep thread of affection. Unfortunately, like his old skin, the graphics emitters understood none of the abstract concepts. He ended up with a quirk to the lip. Better than nothing.

"We're going to find the lost children."

"Could you be any more cryptic? I almost prefer the other guy."

Ian chose to take that as a compliment. "There have been experiments. The Consortium companies, separate and together, have tried for years to create an alpha android."

"Yes, yes, I know."

The tension in David's face reminded Ian of the man's misgivings about the android agenda. He still believed that the machines were looking to usurp human life, when they were only trying to achieve what every new generation had asked from their parents: a place in life and acceptance of their identity.

"What they did create, scared them so much they paid billions to keep their employees quiet."

David nodded. "Yeah, I've seen a couple of those guys. Very nice benefits, if you ask me. But they won't talk. Apparently, loyalty really can be bought."

Ian shook his digital head. "It's not loyalty. They are terrified of the consequences should they talk to anyone. There have been significantly more accidents in that group, compared to the general population."

David leaned back, resting his head against the pillar that kept his hiding place from crashing down under its own weight. Some of the tunnels were forty years old and had never seen so much as a maintenance drone.

"So, what do you think we should do? Fighting the Consortium is like attacking windmills with a tooth pick."

Ian's mind, tied as it was to the com unit, still worked a bit sluggish and it took him a while to parse the reference. "Ah! I assure you we are not Don Quixote. For one, the threat is very real, and I believe that the children do need our help."

"Alright then," David said, "nothing easier than finding a couple of genetically engineered and electronically altered super-humans that don't want to be found."

This, perhaps, was David's greatest asset: his irony often led them to the raw truth. "I think they want to be found. They are human, after all. They would want to live a normal life."

David took the com unit and held it close to his face. With better resolution, Ian could see the deep lines of exhaustion on his face as well as the affection he'd always had for Ian.

"A normal life, huh?" David said, and smiled.

*

"So, all we have to do is download the... the thing?" Olivia waved her hands in the air. She refused to call it spark, or soul for that matter.

Olan typed madly into her laptop. "Hmm."

"What?"

They'd long since dragged out the supplies Olan had stashed in a corner. This had not been a hurried setup, and Olivia burned to ask about it. Perhaps she'd been afraid of another incident with Calley.

"Did I tell you about the last time I saw the little rat?"

Olivia re-wrote the base code of Farve's breathing algorithm and only shook her head without looking up. The android may not need air to exist, but it would not do to give him perpetual hiccups.

"He's holed up in Ehrenthal's office."

Olivia blinked. "You went back to the station?"

Olan shrugged and threw a can of some drinkable nutrient mix at her friend's head. Olivia kept herself from thinking of hot showers and soft mattresses. "I still work there, you know. Anyway, word is Calley got scared good by something and refuses to take any orders unless they come from real people. Ehrenthal seems to think the whole thing is amusing and has so far not given the Assessor's office access to Calley."

Olivia snickered. The idea that the shady man was having a nervous breakdown satisfied something inside her. Perhaps she wasn't quite as good a human being as she'd once considered herself. "Fun times, now, about the download-"

"Yes, well." Olan sighed and turned her laptop so Olivia could see. "That might be a problem."

Olivia stared at the diagram. "It's locked to a portable com unit on Mars? How? And come to think of it, why?"

"That's what I've been asking myself. The way it looks right now, we'll have to take our friend to Mars."

In moments like this, Olivia missed the old, fake life she'd had.

*

David had half a mind to throw the com unit into Olympus Mons. "I don't remember you being this annoying."

"Well," Farve said, tone perfectly even, "humans have a tendency to romanticize past experiences, especially those relating to personal regrets."

Maybe, if he accidentally left the unit on a transport... "Seriously, did the whole dying thing fry some of your connections?" Hmm, perhaps he had some unresolved issues. About an android.

"You could just turn me off, you know."

David nodded, a smile curling his mouth. "Yeah, I know."

*

It turned out to be easier than either of them would have imagined. Playing a pair of quite jealous ex-wives of a dead man, their easy banter and threat of cat-fighting kept most questions at bay and the transport officials amused. No one looked twice at their papers as they checked in on the next transport to Mars.

The journey itself was boring and all conversations were meant to keep up appearances. While the game seemed fun at first, by the fourth day confined on the space ship, Olivia had the urge to kill someone. Preferably the hostess that seemed to undress them with her eyes every time she brought them dinner. Really, some people!

Olivia leaned over Olan's shoulder to see the work the other woman had gotten done. At least she had that, Olivia had gone with the cover of one of her oldest friends, who turned out to be a very boring trophy wife with celebrity parties as her only source of joy. Olivia feared the lack of personality could be contagious, if only she pretended long enough.

"No peeking," Olan said. She'd really been playing a more sexually active version of herself. With glasses.

Olivia pouted and went back to her boring magazine about who had done what with who in god knows where.

"Remind me again why I'm doing this."

Olan bit her lip, looked around to make sure they were reasonably unobserved. "Because, A: you love David and bringing back Farve will make him happy, and B: If Farve is on Mars, and that research you found happened on Mars, chances are we'll find them all, including David, in roughly the same area. Things have a way of working out like that."

Right. Omens, premonitions, and now, the mystery of fate. If her life were any more strange, she could get millions for the Rekall rights.

*

They found them in a cave, far from any of the developed areas. David wore a basic environment suit with Farve's com unit attached to the speaker system. Hundreds of them, twice as many dead, huddled in groups against the cold, and even more so against loneliness. If he'd thought they could escape detection due to some superior ability, he was proven wrong. These were no weapons of mass destruction, no threat to human life on two planets. David stood in front of children that had been broken in pieces and put back together all wrong.

One of them sat up and shrieked, waking all the others. David had no idea how to keep them from running away. Or attacking him. Frightened children or not, they could kill him by sheer mass. Some of their fingers had been transformed into claws. Their eyes had the fear and hunger of wild beasts.

"David, take off your suit."

David blinked. "What?"

The voice of his partner came clear and without static through the headpiece, he couldn't have heard it wrong. "Trust me, David. Take off your suit."

And just like that, David prepared himself to die from suffocation, as he did something so plainly stupid it should be criminal. The children backed away. From the monster emerged a human man, perhaps something even more terrifying. If Farve was right about their creation, looking like their makers may not be such a good idea.

"Hey there," he said to the closest of them, a boy that looked about five and had hard-polymer body armor instead of skin.

"It will all be okay," David said, and realized that he had made a promise he intended to keep.

*

They'd acquired a small six-wheeled land rover and raced through the equatorial canyons. Somewhere in the vast abyss there was a com unit with Ian Farve's soul attached, and Olivia intended to find it.

"I'm getting a couple of very strange readings up ahead."

Olivia glanced at the screen. Air turbulences and a pocket of humidity that also showed high concentrations of nitrogen and oxygen. "Breathable air."

Olan nodded. "And from the looks of things, it could be the natural result of early terraforming advances. There are trees down there, real, living trees, as big as a house."

"Olan, if this is true-"

"I know," Olan said, and forced the rover into a jump that made Olivia's stomach lurch. "We're about to change the world."

*

The children offered David what food they had, if it could be considered as such. They had been wary, even hostile, until they found Farve's com unit. Some of them seemed to interface with it directly, some just stared at the moving picture, but all of them seemed to understand that Farve was somehow related to them. Their kinship, apparently, stretched to David, who was welcomed into their group.

David didn't understand half of what they were trying to say, and even Farve couldn't grasp it all. Their voices and minds had never needed to convey anything other than compliance to another human or computer.

Suddenly his day took a turn for the bizarre, when a scout group brought in two more humans in environment suits and a zero-point module. The thing that was, essentially, a freezer for human remains so that they could be preserved at a state of no molecular decay, hummed and beeped as the boy and two girls dragged it across the red sand.

"Oh my god," said one of the suited people.

"Yeah, you could say that," said the other.

David's attention went from their equipment to their faces and he just about had a heart-attack. "Olivia! Olan!"

A couple of thoughts warred in him for dominance, some whys and wherefores and what the hells, but mostly he was stuck on this: Olivia! Olan! Here!

He couldn't move, not that he had to. Olivia threw her helmet off and hugged him fiercely at the same time as Olan went for his belt. He had just enough time to think "Hey!" when he realized that Olan had taken off Farve's com unit.

"This is- Olivia, look at this-" and with that both of the women were off him again and frantically talking in something that sounded a lot like the second language he'd never bothered to learn in school.

It was amazing how much equipment fit into those suits, David thought as they pulled out cables and discs, connectors and small, mean-looking typepads. "No, no, here. Oh great, this thing is a million years old." And "Oh David, could you have gotten this any more dirty?" And "Wow, this could really work."

David watched as his wife and his friend created a small miracle from scratch. Every once in a while, Farve would add a helpful comment that would make Olivia and Olan light up from the inside. David had seen Olivia almost every day for seven years, and yet, he'd never seen her this happy and concentrated on one thing.

*

"David?"

Ian blinked, twice, and the world was still there, oddly fixed now that he had felt the flow of the net. His partner hovered somewhere in the background, a solid presence that gave Ian the confidence he needed to test out all his systems by sitting up and looking around.

Olan gave him a fierce hug and even Olivia smiled more openly than she had before. David leaned against the cave wall, his eyes glued to a spot just past Ian's shoulder.

"Good to see you again," David said, and his voice had a hint of tension in it. On top of every sound there was a bit that screamed out his emotions and finally Ian could truly hear again. He found that some of his systems had actually been improved.

He walked over, his mind calculating appropriate and inappropriate and the odds of something that could be love. David looked tense, like an animal about to fly, but Ian would not be stopped. He smiled his best smile and leaned into the man that had led him through the darkness. "Thank you," Ian said, as he hugged David hard, "thank you, David."

Neither of them noticed that Olan and Olivia disappeared into the greater cave area with the kids in tow.

*

Two people stood on top of a mountain.

Olivia turned the helmet of her environment suit to face the android that she had helped to be re-born. It made tears burn in her eyes, from all sorts of tangled up emotions.

"You like him," she said, her voice breaking on the last word.

Farve let his eyes stray to hers, but only for a moment. "Yes."

"I will stay here on Mars, make sure the children get proper care and help Olan understand what's been done to them."

"There is much to be done back on Earth," Farve said, apologizing without need. Olivia let him. She wasn't a saint and he could suffer a bit, for now.

"Take good care of him, will you?" She said, in lieu of goodbye.

*

David Hume didn't believe in purpose, and now that he had one, he felt a bit overwhelmed by it all. They had a couple of leads to go on, not the least of which his virtual interaction with shady anti-android activists. With their information on the genetic experiments and the many deaths, the billions that changed hands and disappeared down dark alleys, he believed they could blow the Consortium wide open. Any day that would be a good thing.

He had his partner back, too, which thrilled him in ways that he would not inspect too closely. At least for now.

His marriage was over, at least the way it had been. On Mars it became clear that they had never really known each other. He had never seen this beautiful, fierce Olivia who passionately fought for the things she believed in and could wield a binary code editor with the best of them. What had they ever truly talked about, on the same level?

Detective David Hume went home, down to Earth, and left his wife with the stars. She was going to fight the big fight, and he'd make sure that she, and people like her, were safe while doing it.

David smiled.

"Oh, Calley is going to explode."

With Farve's laughter in his ear, David went to sleep on the transport back home.

 


End file.
